Hi everyone. I realized a week or so ago as we tightened the screws on some revisions to profitably.com that adamrneary.com had grown quite stale. In fact, we were still leading off with “Confessions of a Startup CEO” even though we had stopped making those videos many months ago.
The reason for the shift, as you can quite imagine, was that we have been producing a ton of content over at profitably.com, and I didn’t want to be building my personal brand when we could all be building Profitably’s. Now we have covered a ton of ground on that front, and it’s my site is holding back the magic.
In jazz and web design I endorse stealing liberally from people smarter and more artistic than we, particularly if you site them. So I thought I would call out a couple places from which some good ideas.
David Cancel has a great blog over at http://davidcancel.com and I think he does a killer job of striking the balance between his personal voice and the voice of Performable, which is probably a good reason why Performable is now a great part of HubSpot. Good for him, and thanks, David, for all the good advice.
Anil Dash has been blogging for more than 10 years at http://dashes.com/anil. What struck me the instant I saw his site was its brilliant simplicity. If you google “simple elegant wordpress theme” you’ll get (circa August 2011) droves on flashy themes with high-res images and “elegant” image sliders. They look like splash sites for a new BMW coming out, and while that’s great for cars and recording artists’ new albums, what I wanted out of simple, elegant, and clean I found with Anil’s site.
I borrowed liberally from Anil’s layout, style, and typography, including the 1-column framework, the simple navigation, the concept behind his About page, and many other moments of clean and elegant design. If Anil Dash is any indication, it’s that 10 years of blogging teaches you what’s important, and to leave the rest behind.
Kristarella is major contributor to the community behind the Thesis theme, which I found to be just about the best simple theme for implementing the ideas I had. While I didn’t borrow a tremendous amount of stylistic influence from her site at http://www.kristarella.com/ I did learn a ton about getting my own ideas done quickly, and her contributions to the knowledge base at http://diythemes.com/thesis were fantastic. This is pretty basic stuff for many of my readers, but it gave me a crash course in CSS and Thesis that made the redesign a short weekend project and not a monster.
Matt Dunn over at http://matthewlyle.com/ reminded me how much I love a good red. It’s that simple. Blue is my favorite color, but as Jack White will tell you, when it’s time to use red, nothing else will do. Red, White, and Black are a powerful set. Thanks, Matt!
I know it’s a throwaway for most of you, but I fell in love with rampant use of short codes while reading the Rails Guides (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html). Long stretches of text become instantly more digestible when you’re able to block them off in helpful ways, and these guides are great at that. My posts are conspicuously short of these, but not for long…
Another great find that came out of perusing Anil Dash’s site was my discovery of Readability. I think they have the recipe down, though I am not in love with the emphasis on the Kindle, since I am a shameless and unapologetic iPad fan. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the crew at Readability is keen on getting the metadata behind posts correct so that a broad range of devices and reading mediums can consume your content. The guidelines at http://www.readability.com/publishers/guidelines/#view-exampleGuidelines are currently being integrated into posts at adamrneary.com and profitably.com alike.
Mark Suster over at http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ is another Thesis user, and while pulling together my site, I spent a decent amount of time taking some crib notes from him on how to fill the site out with a smart selection of widgets and useful information. Naturally, his two-column format allows for much readier access to his intro paragraph, social media signups, and other subscription information. It’s not too dissimilar from David Cancel’s. I am torn, because I like my new 1-column view, but you may see me biting the bullet on that shortly.
Zach Klein, who is himself a well-known designer, has an understandably more avant garde splash page at http://zachklein.com/. In a quick way, he points very casually to his other web properties in a way that’s more personal than a string of social media icons. I ended up using both on my About page, but Zach’s approach is a great reminder to be yourself.
Finally, Chris Dixon does a killer job of putting together a more curated catalog of best posts. He has them arranged by category in a digestible way, and I think this is useful to new readers who want to jump into his world view but wouldn’t otherwise know where to start. If you’re perusing TechCrunch, you just want to see the latest. But if you’re just discovering http://cdixon.org/ you probably want to get up to speed on the areas most relevant for you straight away, and Chris gives you a great way to do that.
Thanks, everyone, for the great inspiration!
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